


And Never To Part

by thesleepingsatellite



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Incest, Reincarnation, Sibling Incest, Temporary Character Death, Witchcraft, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-11-17 14:46:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11277468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesleepingsatellite/pseuds/thesleepingsatellite
Summary: Siblings, she thinks to herself.There is a pause, and then a response.Twins, he says.Bound for eternity.Cheryl and Jason are lovers cursed to be reborn as twins.





	And Never To Part

**Author's Note:**

  * For [burglebezzlement](https://archiveofourown.org/users/burglebezzlement/gifts).



> Title taken shamelessly from Rick Astley's "Together Forever".

She stands at the gallows, noose tight around her neck. To her right, a judge stands, heavy-set and clad in black, reading a list of her alleged crimes from a scroll of paper. To her left stands her executioner, waiting to hoist her into the air. In front of her stands a crowd of stone-faced puritans who wish to see her repent for her sins.

She cannot repent. She did not commit the crimes of which she is accused. They are a smoke screen, a list of supposed transgressions to distract the puritans in attendance from the true nature of her crime. She fell in love with a married man, and he with her. Yet, she alone must bear the punishment for their crimes.

She raises her head defiantly, her red hair cascading loose over her shoulders, and searches the crowd until she finds him, his face pale and his eyes wide beneath his own shock of auburn hair. 

"Promise me," she'd said to him in the days before they were discovered. "Promise me we will be bound together for eternity."

"I do," he had said, before bending to kiss her. When his lips brushed against hers, she slashed her palm with the knife she had concealed within the folds of her dress. Her pale hand darted out to grab his, and she cut his palm in the same manner before threading their fingers together. As their blood mingled between their palms, she closed her eyes and her mouth moved in a silent incantation.

Now, on a platform in front of a mob screaming for her blood, she meets his watery gaze and remembers the incantation she had sent to the deities. It was a deeply felt plea to bind her and her beloved for all eternity, in this life and the next.

As the executioner tightens the noose, she feels sorrow for all the women who had been falsely accused of witchcraft, executed for crimes they did not commit. Though she had never - as the charges against her stated - poisoned cattle, caused crops to fail, or induced miscarriage in another woman's pregnancy, she is a witch. 

Her magic is strong. Her beloved will be bound to her for centuries. 

The last thing she feels is a sharp tug and a sudden loss of breath.

\--- 

Then, there is awareness. 

She inhales, and it is liquid. She tries to open her eyes, and all is dark. A steady, rhythmic sound pulses through her surroundings like the beat of a drum. Reaching out with her fingertips in one direction, she encounters a soft, giving membrane encasing her. Reaching out in the other, she encounters her wombmate.

 _It is you_ , she hears, the words echoing in her growing brain.

She touches his arm through the amniotic sac membranes that separate them. _It is me,_ she confirms. She feels a wave of love, recognition and wonder which is quickly overwhelmed by a tsunami of awareness of what she has done.

 _Siblings_ , she thinks to herself.

There is a pause, and then a response. _Twins_ , he says. _Bound for eternity_

\---

And so it is, so it shall be, forever more.

Over and over again, they are born into this world as twins entwined in a bond breakable only by death. Not once does she survive past the age of eighteen, the age at which she was hanged. Life after life, she is claimed by illness, by violent accidents, and soon she comes to realize that rather than granting a blessing, the deities placed upon her a terrible curse. 

During one life, in the mid-1800s, she dies in the throes of violent childbirth. The babe is his, of course. Thomas James Blossom enters the world screaming and covered in blood.

In another life, decades later, an overwhelming sense of dread overcomes her at age seventeen. With guilt weighing down her steps, she steals away to the other side of the continent. She spends the days leading up to her eighteenth birthday hiding in a rooming house. She thinks of him, wonders if he is looking for her. The evening of her birthday, she leaves the rooming house, her steps light with the hope that she has broken the curse after all. She walks to the beach and sits upon the damp sand to watch the burnt orange disk of the sun sink below the ocean's horizon. Her lifeless body is found there the following morning, her red hair spread out in a fiery fan upon the sand. 

She does not attempt to leave again. Eighteen years at a time with her beloved is worth the pain of death and decades of emptiness before he rejoins her in the cycle of life and death once again. 

\---

The cycle repeats, seemingly without end. 

When they are born as Cheryl and Jason, the cycle is broken. 

During their lives together, they were blessed with an empathic connection. The connection is most vibrant and alive when they are in close proximity to each other, and almost overwhelming when they touch. It weakened with distance, becoming a low-level awareness of the other’s consciousness. 

Since Cheryl had left him at the river, the connection had grown dimmer until it had disappeared entirely. During the days before his body was found, she wondered about the distances he must have travelled to dampen the connection to such a degree.

Never did it occur to her that he had been killed. Untimely demise was her curse, his was to live countless lives without her. Profound grief and disbelief overwhelms her when she learns that his body has been found. Not once during all their lives together has he died before her. Outside of the year she spent fleeing to California in the 1920's, she has never existed apart from him. 

During the teenaged ritual that is a pep rally a brutal wave of realization rushes over her. She realizes she does not know how to live without him. Unlike him, she's never had to. He has lived whole lives without her, gone on to marry, have children, leave a line of descendants and a burgeoning empire that they are born into more often than not. 

"Jason. He's gone, " she sobs to Veronica. 

"I know," says Veronica, "I know he is." But she doesn't, really. No-one can. The burden of terrible awareness is Cheryl’s alone to bear. 

"You don't- you don't understand, " Cheryl despairs, the emptiness of existence without him overwhelming her. "He was supposed to come back. I'm alone." 

He always came back to her. 

A gentle hand soothes her, moving her long hair aside to squeeze her shoulder in an act of comfort. It is shallow compared to the depth of connection she shared with Jason. 

"You're not alone," Veronica says. "It's okay."

It isn't okay. Nothing will ever be okay again. She is truly alone for the first time in her lengthy existence.

Yet, as she moves to throw her arms around Veronica and accept the comfort given, a small spark of hope flares up within her. 

Perhaps with the sacrifice of his life during this iteration, the deities will be appeased. Perhaps after all this time, she will be allowed to live.


End file.
